Posts Tagged ‘hobart’

I did a couple of sessions on OurDelta at the Linux.conf.au database miniconf: an overview of the project, a short delve into the features, and a “hacking the mysql server for dummies” which was found of particular interest. It’s a pity that session didn’t get accepted into the MySQL conference, it even had MySQL-uberguru Antony Curtis as co-speaker.

In the hacking talk in Hobart, I showed people the basic infrastructure of the source tree, then going through one particular patch and which changes it makes inside the server (and why). This is an excellent way to learn, as patches have a neat limited scope yet they do something significant. The good news is that the sessions were recorded, so when the LCA team finishes transcoding the hundreds of sessions we might be able to put ours up here!

Original author and MySQL co-founders Monty and David were also present, with their families. Monty told me that the last time he’d visited Australia was for an AUUG conference in 1998, that’s a few years before I moved here! David was at Linux.conf.au 2002 in Brisbane, he stayed at my place and my black cat (then tiny kitten) Figaro crawled on his neck. Anyway it was great to catch up, discuss ideas, have some Salmiakki, and share “home cooked” dinner (we had a full kitchen at the accomodation) with a number of other conference attendees. It was a great week!

In case you haven’t seen, Monty left Sun to be independent again. Still working on MySQL though! More interesting times ahead?

In other news, I’ve moved from VirtualBox to VMware Fusion for my desktop development system. While generally very nice (and free), VirtualBox kept destroying my snapshots, thus making work pretty much impossible and causing a lot of extra time getting wasted. VMware Fusion also supports 64-bit guests under OSX, multiple CPU cores, and other fancies. Still, I do hope (and trust) that VirtualBox will be developed and debugged further, it definitely has good potential!